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DRILSDOWN Case Study: Equatorial "moisture island" budget in MERRA2

Notebook of IDV visualization session

Case dates: 2007-08 13th to 17th

Drilling down into the science of:

Mapes, Cheedela, Igel, Tsai 2019: The dynamics of water vapor islands over the western equatorial Indian ocean. In preparation




Sections

  1. Instantaneous CWV and tendencies
  2. DYN+PHY + ANA and d/dt(CWV)
  3. Monthly version for this month

The cells below capture IDV session images and movies, captioned in a logical flow

In [1]:
%reload_ext ipython_IDV

The following shows CWV and IR cloudiness for a moisture island in the WEIO:

In [7]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "An equatorial moisture island, convecting where CWV > 50mm or so"
In [24]:
%make_movie -capture legend -caption "Vapor is well behaved in time, although convection flickers"

The following shows dqvdt_mst on -10 t0 10 mm/d scale (red = drying)

In [9]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "Moist physics is a vapor sink (precipitation)"

The following shows trb (evaporative source)

In [12]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "Evaporation I take it, -10 to 10 mm/d color range"

The following shows total physics (E-P): mst is the sink (red), trb is the source (blue)

In [11]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "Total physical tendencies"
In [19]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "Smoothed physical tendencies"

The following shows dqvdt_dyn -- moisture convergence/ vertical advection so big noisy!

In [14]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "DYN source, wildly saturates -10 to 10 mm/d color scale !?"

Dynamics dqvdt_dyn -- still big even when smoothed, and big all over

In [15]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "DYN source, wildly saturates -10 to 10 mm/d color scale !?"

DYN+PHY pattern looks almost totally like DYN, albeit weaker a bit

In [25]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "DYN+PHY"

That leads us to dqvdt_ana -- Analysis Tendency

In [16]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "ANA tendency term "

ANA term smoothed

In [18]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "ANA term smoothed"

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Well, DYN + PHY + ANA does add up to the time tendency

In [29]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "DYN + PHY + ANA"
In [28]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "Time tendency over 3 hours"

ANA is the error in DYN+PHY, how coherent is it in space-time?

Piecewise constant in time for 6h (these frames are 3 hourly); diurnal, but just big and wild

Still, more blue than red in our moisture island... i think?

In [30]:
%make_movie -capture legend -caption "Analysis tendency"

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Monthly mean is so much more well behaved!

In [42]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "Monthly TQV"

SST map

In [43]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "Monthly SST and TQV"
In [41]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "Monthly DQVDT_PHY"
In [40]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "Monthly DQVDT_DYN"

Monthly ANA smaller than PHY and DYN

But if it is viewed as "missing physics", it seems to

1. moisten moist areas including the Tongue (is heating & ascent too top heavy in model?) 
2. dry the Arabian littoral (is SST too warm in the model up there?) 

SST monthly mean

3. Dry downwind of Sri Lanka (is the wind wake too weak in model?) 
4. Dry on southern flank of Tongue (is evap too strong, perhaps inflow too surface-intensified?) 

Evaporation, note southern flank of tongue

The following shows K

In [39]:
%make_image -capture legend -caption "Monthly DQVDT_ANA"

For exact replicability, capture a ~1 MB sized IDV state bundle and embed it in this notebook

In [44]:
%save_bundle -embed 
In [51]:
# Time stamp this notebook 
!date
Fri Mar 22 19:04:15 EDT 2019

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About the notebook-IDV project: See the 0:59 YouTube video intro or Documentation is here, from this github code repo.